An unconventional piece of writing, Buzzfeed’s YouTube video “Mexican People Try Taco Bell for the First Time” depicts a few Mexican families trying United States fast-food giant and “Mexican” chain, Taco Bell.  The short is set up interview-style, with two to four people in each section.  The video begins with a question asked to all of the participants before they try the food: what do they expect? After each person gave their answer, the tasting process began.  Each dish was presented to the audience and was followed by the reviews, in which each set of people conversed about how they felt about the food: its taste, how authentic it was, and whether they would eat it again.  The interviews were wrapped up with a follow-up question about their newfound thoughts regarding Taco Bell.

    The video contains bright and clear visuals, easy-to-read subtitles for the audio in Spanish, and a coherent flow between each dish and set of people.  This video falls under the broad genre of food reviews, but defined narrowly, it is a filmed series of critiques with a humorous undertone.  This texts functions primarily for entertainment: it is short enough to keep the audience’s attention, funny enough to make the audience appreciate it, and relates to an establishment many audiences will be familiar with.  It additionally functions to provide feedback about Taco Bell’s dishes, but this is not the only purpose: after all, most of the audience have tried these foods before, they just want to hear what the interviewees have to say about it.

    I think this text represents a good example of the genre of video food reviews because it serves both the normal purpose of a food review, to inform an audience about what the authors think of a particular restaurant; and a different purpose, to entertain an audience for a short period of time, a task which I think is greatly influenced by the video’s distribution via YouTube.  This text should serve as a mentor for my own writing because it was extremely successful (currently, it has nearly 13 million views), the content is both funny and insightful, and the quality is extremely high in terms of audio-visual production.  

“Mexican People Try Taco Bell for the First Time.”  Youtube, uploaded by Buzzfeed, 8 March 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWSOiZrs3oA.